The Choice of Ants

Caitlin Murphy

I’m sitting, my arms wrapped around my legs, staring at ants crawling to and fro on the pavement. This was once a pastime of mine, when I was a child. When you are a certain indeterminate age, you can do things like spend hours a day watching ants. Eventually there are groundings and girls and grades and abortions and jobs and you pretty much forget altogether about the world that the ants live in. That is, until a moment like now.

If they've missed me over the years, they show no sign of it. Dutiful. Dedicated. Did you know that sometimes they will build a bridge out of their very bodies, drown themselves, just so that others can cross a stream?

Don’t judge. It isn’t the ants themselves that fascinated me, even as a child. It is the scale that they live in, and the truly magical way that they self-organize. I know it isn’t really magic, but we have no other word for it. Magic is what we call things that we don’t understand. (We don’t really understand anything, when you get right down to it, so the truth is that the entire universe is magical. But that’s something else entirely.)

I can hear sirens in the background. The cops, dutifully, are arriving in a rush, and there will be questions and I’m sure at some point I’ll have to deal with the emotional weight of what just happened. But for right now, there’s just me and the ants—the not-so-benevolent God and His useless subjects. Sometimes I would squash one of them and watch it wriggle. It wasn’t viciousness. I didn’t revel in their suffering. It was just some primal urge. Every now and then when you see a long line of ants marching you just have to reach in and pick one. YOU, you say. And their body, half crushed by the mass of your finger, struggles against the inevitable fact that, for no reason at all, a choice was made, or it wasn’t, but either way, there is no turning back.

That’s really what I’m getting at, I think, through all the shock. One moment everything is a certain way and the next it is completely different, and for no other reason than that you were picked out of a line because that’s just how it is, how it will be, forever and ever, Amen.

My wife Sheila—she would have legally been my wife in three months but we had lived together for years—was broken just like one of those ants, a carcass tangled in the metal that used to be our new car. No more marriage planning, no more—well, none of it matters really. I reached down and pushed down, hard, on one of those ants. I picked his abdomen. It popped and spurted whatever ant abdomens contain onto the sidewalk, and he tried to drag the flaccid thing around for a while. Eventually other ants showed up to the scene and carried it off. I wondered if they were the cops and emergency personnel of the ant world, or if they just switched roles.

The cops wanted to know a lot of details that seemed pointless. What was the make of the third car that hit us? Where were we headed? I looked at him dully and said, “Her favorite flavor was mint chocolate chip.” I couldn't think of anything else. Anyway, there were pieces of the car that hit us from behind scattered across the roadway. Did I look like a mechanic? It was a pileup. I remember the bus. The rest happened too fast.

I thought back a moment. How many breaths separated me, now, breathing alone with the ants, and my wife and I in the car, breathing the same air together? A few hundred breaths? An endless chasm.

The 404 Attacks: Project Monarch

I was at the high school dance. Waste of an evening. I mean, I wouldn't have even considered going to something like this. It was embarrassing. But I knew she'd be there. I spent the whole night wishing I could get closer to her. Excuses to brush by, to look just a moment more. I didn't want to be creepy. I want to be her friend.

And then the song started. You know the one. "You spin me right round baby, right round." Cheesy shit but we can all dance ironically. That makes it safer somehow.

Yeah I, I got to know your name. Well and I, could trace your private number baby. Amber. That was her name. Different hair color every week it seemed. Different piercings and tattoos. Same eyes. Nothing could change them. I wanted to.

So I stood in the corner. Gibberish numbers were bouncing around in my head, blocking everything else out. They seemed to come from the music but compound themselves, a feedback loop of infinite proportions. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ... She turned to look at me when the words "Watch out, here I come" seemed to blow the eardrums out of my cheap skull. 21, 34... ACTIVATE LEVEL 5.

Something horrible happened. A snake slithered through my intestines and wrapped its coils like a vice-around my brain, and it squeezed, squeezed, squeezed. The juices in my pineal gland squirted all over my shoes. I fell to the ground. Everyone around me looked on in terror, but the music kept playing.

Dionysus' Dream

One of the many scenes cut to bring Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End down to its fighting weight. Still a worthwhile entry point...

Brown water spurted out of his mouth, splashing to the grungy deck beneath him. He could place himself even before his eyes opened. The sharp scent of salt on the wind, the sound of seagulls wheeling overhead, the perpetual rocking; how, he didn’t know, but he was on a boat.

Dionysus lay helpless on the deck, his arms and legs mostly bound, looking up at the wheeling seagulls and three of the dirtiest men he had seen in his life. They spoke to each other gruffly but easily.

“Th’ bastard’s gonna live, looks like,” said a scratchy, thin voice. Dionysus cracked open a stinging, briny eye, to see a man in a stained wifebeater kneeling over him. The rubbing of rough hands rattled like dried corn husks in his ears as they bound him with waterlogged rope.

Participants Wanted for the Transmedia Revolution!

Hello everyone!

For those of you who have been following my posts here for the last few months, you may have noticed I've been talking a lot about how technology has transformed the publishing industry, and how transmedia storytelling has broken down the barriers between a story and it's audience.

But I haven't really gone into the specifics about how this can be put into practice. There's been a lot of talk about transmedia storytelling, but very few good examples of what the medium is truly capable of.  People and publishers have folded their arms, and decided to "wait and see."

And I don't blame them.  

After all the talk about ground breaking-this, cross platform-that, and immersion-everything, not much has really happened, has it?  There's been a lot of smoke, but no one has lit a match.  

That's about to change.  It won't be long before you'll be participating in a story instead of reading it.  How do I know?

I'm going to help make it happen.

Do I have some amazing new browser plug-in?  Some sort of new transmedia authoring platform?  A storytelling social media network, perhaps?

Nope.  (People always seem to get hung up on the technology...)

The technology of the written word changed how stories were delivered, but not how they were created.  It's the same thing with e-books, film, and television...they are all different methods of delivering the same fictional drug.

It's the story that's important.

What's the difference between slapping a button on a coke machine, and visiting a barista at your local starbucks?

Puff the magic dragon by Ahnamal

A can of soda will always taste the same.  A caramel-pumpkin-spice-mocha-latte with a dash of cinnamon and whip, tastes a lot different if you have him add a splash of pickle juice.

There's only one way to have it your way: ask for it.

Here at Modern Mythology, we know that storytelling isn’t passive.

A good storyteller must actively engage their audience.  A story should be tailored to whom it’s being told to, not diluted and homogenized just to make it more appealing to a potential audience of millions.

The goal of a story should be to make people think, feel, and help them blink away their pedestrian view of the world.  A book or movie should draw you in, engage you, make you a part of it--not run you over.

Films shouldn't blind people with cinematic eye candy, and books shouldn't hypnotize them with pages of sex and violence strung together with a meaningless plot.

But they do, and they will continue to do so, because that's the easiest way for Hollywood and publishers to get your money without you noticing.

It doesn't have to be this way.  Really.

(Unless you're into that kind of thing.)

The Story of a Transmedia Revolution: (Part 2) The Story Wars

The Rise and Fall of a Story-Showing Empire

By Peter Usagi

The Transmedia Revolution has begun!
Which side will you join?
An empire of greedy corporate media cartels?
Or an ancient and mysterious order of storytellers...
Image via Panicposters

After years of study, I've come to realize that contemporary storytelling—books, film, television (and to a significant extent, even live theater)—are a completely passive medium.  They are narratives that lack interaction and any kind of participation from their audience.  These mass-produced mediums of entertainment are more appropriately labeled "story-showing,” then storytelling.

People often wonder why there isn’t anything "new" in Hollywood.  Why is it that every movie, TV show, and most popular literature, tastes like reheated "leftovers" disguised with some kind of mystery sauce?  It’s because after a century of industrialization, we've become indoctrinated as a species of “story consumers.”

We’ve been raised to passively swallow the shallow narratives presented to us in our extended childhoods; schizophrenic mythologies filled with stories that have no depth, meaning, or purpose--other than to entertain (or perhaps more sinisterly, distract).

All of our modern entertainment (all of our stories) are almost entirely mono-active.

Our “entertainment industry” is simply a convenient medium for a 24/7 multimedia stream of consumer subconsciousness—peppered every fifteen minutes with commercials, product placement, and other forms of materialist propaganda.  Even traditional literature has become a victim to this malaise.  

The Lost Art of Storytelling

Parents who "tell” stories to their children, usually aren't really “telling” them.  They’re reading them word for word from a book; an example of modern mono-active story-watching.  Unless the child occasionally takes control of the narrative, thus making it interactive (I.E. "No, Red Riding Hood had a cell phone, and she called the cops on that mean nasty wolf!") the true immersive, and transitive aspects of storytelling are neutered, or even entirely absent in our modern fictions.

Is modern media a "big bad wolf" that
devours creativity and imagination?
Image via Wikipedia

If you put your book down, and “tell” a story to your audience (instead of read it), something about your story will always change, each and every time you tell it.  Unless, of course (as you’ll find in live theater), you have your lines memorized.

This is because even when you tell the same story (with the identical characters and plot),  you’ll always be a different person each time you tell it, and so will your audience (even if they’re the same people):

If you told a story to a group of recent college grads (while they were partying around a campfire in the middle of the wilderness) the crazy things you did to get into your career field…would that story be identical to the one you told to a classroom of second graders, the day after you lost your job?

If this is the case, does "storytelling" in its interactive sense, still exist in today's society?  Perhaps...

Thanks to new combinations of divergent media platforms, a new kind of storytelling is on the rise.  One that recognizes the importance of engaging an increasingly distracted and impatient audience: transmedia.

Modernism to Postmodernism to Postmortemism

By P. Emerson Williams


We cultural types do love to declare death wherever we cast our jaded blood-shot eyes. When our imaginations are exhausted, hard-ons for the latest arising only with greater efforts require new extremes of fetishism. A point comes when completed work crowds out attention. Art, empire, economy, politics look to us to be sated with days and ready to give in to sweet oblivion.

Lady Gaga killed sex, says the once much discussed Camille Paglia, who quotes her subject who declaims “Music is a lie”, “Art is a lie”, “Gaga is a lie”. The death of the novel is an idea so oft repeated that one can envision members of the literary establishment daring each other to intone the phrase three times in front of a mirror in expectation of the candyman to appear. And closer to home for us here, the right honourable psychonaut James L. Kent writing for Acceler8or the new transhumanist vehicle established by R. U. Sirius says we've come to rest after years of the deceler8ing of music as a living mode of expression. Nice opening shot.

Every style of traditional, ethnic, and world music has been incorporated into the modern pop uber-genre. There are no more Afro beats, throat singers, Middle Eastern microtonal scales, Buddhist Ohms, Irish sea shanties, American folk songs, Navajo ancestral chants, and so on, that haven’t already been chewed up, digested, and shat out by modern pop composers.

Forcing sound snippets into a twelve-tone, four on the floor format is for sure a denigration of these traditions, but it's a very colonial Western POV that would consider that this raiding of sampled sounds a cancelling out of entire traditions of music and culture. I recall a thread in an occult social site that began from a post that stated basically that Eastern philosophies were being killed by Western adoption through Western seekers not understanding the finer points or getting entire belief systems wrong. Well, I have news – taking a photo of a person does not trap their soul in the camera and Americans weaving Tibetan buddhism into candy-coated self help material doesn't make all the monks in exile disappear from the universe.

Maybe he's right. Perhaps the hum that is plaguing many towns across the globe with no detectable source is just the musicological equivalent of the smell of dead plague victims piling up.

Arthur Krystal is a voice in the Death of the Novel chorus for some time. In an interview in Harper's magazine he expands his theme:

Leaving film aside, since it’s a relatively recent art, the arts as we know them have run their course. You can argue this until your face is blue, but it won’t change the historical fact. Time and technology wait for no artist, and unfortunately history has seen fit to alter our sense of time by the invention of new technologies.

Tina Brown Asks Philip Roth About the Future of the Novel from The Daily Beast Video on Vimeo.
Philip Roth has devoted his life to creating novels, but he’s pessimistic about their future.
“The book can’t compete with the screen,” Roth tells Tina Brown in this video, and even the Kindle won’t change that.
“It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen," Roth says. "It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen.”

Fallen Nation Pharmaceutical SEO Games Destroy The World In Revenge Tsunami

You think this panda cares about fucking word counts?
I don't fucking think so. 

By James Curcio
Today has mostly been consumed working on fiction. I'm working on something of an intermission section, in terms of pacing, for Party At The World's End, which draws on material from Babylon Burning. Why? You ask. I know a lot of writers will tell you otherwise but apparently publisher DO care about wordcount. So if it's 55,000 rather than 45,000 words, that's apparently a potential deal-breaker. As if as a writer I couldn't kick up 10,000 words if that was the only thing standing between me and a six figure advance.
Yeah. Right. So let me kick a little of this prose at you even though that's not the standard on this site. Not the final draft but as they... as someone once said, it's "good enough for Jazz." I'll put some of it behind a cut. (And yeah, the protagonist is based on some people I know. Though I'll never say who. And yeah, I know the Pharma iz spooky evil demons out to fill our bodies with their poisons myth is from out in left field.)

So without more bullshit, Here's some steaming hot bullshit. 

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